Josef Albers

1888–1976

Throughout his career as an artist, teacher, and writer, Josef Albers investigated the “interdependence” of color and perception. His famous series Homage to the Square (1950–76) explores this concept in more than a thousand paintings, drawings, prints, textiles, and murals, each composed of three or four nesting squares and produced in an array of colors. He began the series at the time he joined the faculty at Yale University, after years spent teaching at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College. His subsequent work in the classroom and studio led to Interaction of Color (1963), his influential book on color theory.

Albers created the Homages with meticulous consistency. After applying several coats of gesso to a composition board, he penciled one of four set layouts, all symmetrical and weighted toward the bottom edge. He then applied a predetermined palette from the center out, spreading colors straight from the tube with a knife and recording names and manufacturers on the verso (he occasionally mixed paints, including the blue here in the early “Ascending”). Such precision was key to demonstrating the mutability of perception, or what he called the difference between “physical fact and psychic effect.” Across the series, color combinations alter not only how we see individual hues but also how we perceive space and form. As Albers noted, the squares seem to “move forth and back, in and out, and grow up and down and near and far, as well as enlarged and diminished.” In “Ascending” squares of yellow, cream, gray, and blue radiate upward. Albers’s subtitle references this illusion of movement, while hinting at the potential for metaphysical transformation.

Getty record

Introduction

Born 19 March 1888; died 25 March 1976. Albers trained as an art teacher at Königliche Kunstschule in Berlin, Germany, from 1913 to 1915. From 1916 to 1919 he began his work as a printmaker at the Kunstgewerbschule in nearby Essen, Germany. In 1919 he went to Munich, Germany, to study at the Königliche Bayerische Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, where he was a pupil of Max Doerner and Frank Stuck. In 1920 he attended the preliminary course (Vorkurs) at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, and was appointed a master in 1923 or 1925. In 1925 Albers moved with the Bauhaus to Dessau, Germany, where he was named master. From 1928 to 1930 he was also in charge of the furniture workshop. In 1932 he moved with the Bauhaus to Berlin. From 1933, after the closure of the Bauhaus in Berlin, until 1949, Albers taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. From 1948 to 1950 or from 1950 to 1958, Albers was professor and chairman of the Department of Design at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. He remained there as a visiting professor until 1960. After his retirement from Yale University, Albers continued to live in New Haven and to paint, monitor his own exhibitions and publications, write, lecture and work on large commissioned sculptures for architectural settings. He was highly regarded as a teacher and is considered influential for the generation of artists emerging in the 1950s and 1960s. Comment on works: abstract

Country of birth

Germany

Roles

Artist, author, designer, glass artist, painter, photographer, professor, sculptor, teacher, theorist, typographer

ULAN identifier

500033049

Names

Josef Albers, Albers, Joseph Albers

View the full Getty record

Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed December 18, 2025.

Not on view

First acquired
1954

Date of birth
March 19, 1888

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